Tuesday, November 18, 2014

This is a short critique of Thom Stark's The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (And Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It) published by Wipf & Stock.

Apart from noting the incredibly arrogant title, the idea that "inerrancy" tries to hide something, rather than "inerrantists," may sound less confrontational, but is extremely nonsensical nonetheless. Ideas don't try to hide things. People do. But, in good humor, I've done the same above to mimic this. Now on to a more serious critique.

Stark's main argument, that the Bible is full of contradictory
theological teachings (and therefore, sometimes "gets God wrong," is supported by a host of misinterpretations garnered
from Stark’s ignorance of the historical, social, and literary context of the
passages he cites. This leads him into a host of logical, factual, and
linguistic errors in his overly-sensationalized attempt to show the Bible to be
riddled with theological error.

1.Stark argues that the Bible contradicts itself
in terms of whether God judges children for the sins of their parents. He fails
to note in the passages he cites, however, the very nuanced approach the Bible
takes toward such an idea.

a.The Bible never teaches the idea that children
in the household are separate individuals from their parents. Hence, to punish
a man is to punish all of his possessions, which includes all of the people
(e.g., children) of a household. This is clear from the passages that Stark
mentions concerning children being punished with their parents.

b.The claim that God does not judge the sons for
the sins or righteousness of the fathers is referring to sons who are no longer
of the household and have made individual choices as independent entities. This
is made clear by the description of what the sons might do in passages such as
Ezekiel 18 (i.e., murder, commit adultery with another man’s wife, etc.). This
is hardly referring to little children, and indeed, refers to an individual who
has parted ways with the ways of his father.

c.That God visits the judgment of fathers upon
their sons, even to the third and fourth generation, refers to those who
continue to hate God (i.e., those who do not part from the ways of the father
but instead continue in their father’s rebellion, thus receiving the wrath of
God, which the Bible pictures as something that is cumulative when sons do not
depart from the wicked ways of their fathers.

d.One may not like this idea, but this hardly
shows the Bible to contradict itself. Instead, the contradiction is between our
contemporary culture, its modern sensibilities, and the Bible; but this is
hardly what Stark intends to show. Hence, his argument fails here.

2.Stark attempts to argue that some passages argue
in favor of “xenophobic” behavior, whereas others argue for more open relations
with people of other nations.

a.What Stark calls “xenophobia” is a religious concern
in the passages he cites, not an ethnic one. In fact, in the same books that
make such claims against taking women who worship other gods are indications
that such is merely religious in nature (e.g., The Book of Numbers, which
presents Moses as taking an Ethiopian woman for a wife, after having been
married to a Midianite woman, and yet, presents marrying Midianite women as
evil. There are nuances in the text that Stark’s approach simply misses,
intentionally so, in order to make his argument. Another example might be the
fact that Malachi is in the context of Ezra-Nehemiah, and vice versa. The
problem is clearly marrying the daughters of foreign gods, not ethnicity. (See
also the Deuteronomic passages that both forbid marriage with pagans under
condemnation for idolatry and permit marriage with foreign women who are not.)

b.Stark here, of course, commits an egregious
fallacy in his argument; and as it pervades his entire discourse, we will see
it time and time again. This fallacy is a linguistic one and a bit of sleight
of hand by Stark, one which I am sure he does not realize he is making. This,
of course, is that his argument is intending to show that the Bible contradicts
itself; but he does this by critiquing individual passages that are not the
Bible. Let me explain. The Bible is the entire entity of what orthodox
Christians believe is the Word of God. This is what Stark is attempting to pull
apart as errant. However, in order to do so, Stark must make the Bible into
individual pieces that are no longer the Bible, but passages ripped out of that
context and placed within alternate contexts in order to say something
different than what they say in the context of the Bible as a whole. The
problem is that orthodox Christians don’t believe these individual passages
communicate what the Bible says as a whole. They merely contribute to the
larger picture of what the whole Bible says. Hence, it is much like hearing a
point made by a speaker and ignoring any qualifications and nuances that
speaker makes to clarify his point. One could then take the whole discourse of
that speaker and turn it against itself by ignoring these nuances, taking them
out separately from one another, and then pitting them against one another, as
though the speaker had contradicted himself, rather than clarified his
statements with nuanced qualifications. It’s really a major fallacy of
communication that refuses to participate in the communicative process with the
speaker simply because one either doesn’t have the linguistic and logical
ability to take things in context, or because one merely wants to prove that
the speaker should not be trusted. I’m afraid Stark’s book seems to be a bit of
both. If Stark wants to make his case against the Bible of evangelicals (his
foil), he’s going to have to engage with their concept of the Bible, not a
linguistically fallacious hybrid that seems to make up his own. Unfortunately,
Stark not only does this with the Bible as a whole, but also with individual
texts, as we will see.

3.Stark attempts to argue that the Bible teaches
child sacrifice. This is accomplished by taking a text out of its current
context and speculating as to what the history of a word, phrase, or sentence
may have been in an ancient Canaanite/Paleo-Israelite context.

a.The problem, of course, is that this commits the
fallacy above. All scholars agree that when one takes these passages in their
literary biblical contexts, they do not teach child sacrifice, but rather child
dedication. This etymological fallacy is well known by most scholars, and yet,
such a diachronic methodology to answer a question that only a synchronic
investigation can answer is absolutely needed if one is to buy into Stark’s
argument here. For those of us who are linguistically trained, we’ll keep our
money in our pockets.

b.Not only is the methodology of concern, but the
speculative nature of such reconstructions assumes a knowledge of the original
authors of such an idea that we simply do not have. Yet, again, one absolutely
needs to confirm such knowledge in order to make the claim that the original author
intended to convey such and such an idea. No such confirmation is, or can be,
made by those scholars who peddle this idea, as the original context (if there
really was one) is lost and cannot confirm such an interpretation (and, as said before, all
admit that the idea has been radically transformed in the biblical texts, so
that the “Bible” of orthodox Christians does not actually teach such an idea at
all).

4.Stark also argues along the same lines that the
Bible teaches polytheism as well as henotheism and monotheism.

a.The same etymological fallacy can be pinned on
this wildly popular idea. This, again, ignores that a phrase may or may not
carry its implicatures depending upon whether the context repeats the
contextual referents of the original context. In other words, as I’ve argued
before, an implicature does not carry in a foreign context, and it certainly
cannot be assumed in a context where the implicature is often contradicted,
such as the idea of polytheism in the religious context of ancient Israel, and
especially, within the literary context of the Bible. Instead, words and
phrases that once carried a particular implicature in a foreign context often
become figurative expressions that convey a specific meaning that no longer
carries the implicature. For instance, the phrase, “Aphrodite is the goddess of
love” in an ancient Graeco-Roman polytheistic context implies that “goddesses [literally]
exist.” However, change the context to a non-polytheistic one, and a phrase
such as, “Tyra is the goddess of fashion,” does not carry the implicature that
goddesses exist in a literal sense at all, but rather that, in a figurative/analogical
sense only, Tyra is the highest of all other fashionistas. The implicature has
been lost in a monotheistic/agnostic/atheistic context.

Stark, as well as others who advocate this position (Mark Smith being the
most prominent), fails to note this, and by doing so, begs the question as to
whether a text conveys polytheism.

b.He further commits the same fallacy along these
same lines by failing to note that in its biblical context (whether within that
of a book or section of books, such as Deuteronomy or the Deuteronomistic
History) polytheistic phrases exist inside the context of monotheistic theology,
and hence, do not carry their implicatures. Hence, his argument, yet again, has
him arguing for the errancy of a fictitious Bible of his own making, not the
one in which orthodox Christians believe. If Stark were to have entitled his
book, “Why My Reconstructed and Dissected Bible Is Errant” one would have no
problem with agreeing with him. However, Stark’s Bible is clearly meant to be
conflated with the Bible in which the average evangelical believes, which makes
the argument a bit of a bait and switch.

5.Finally, in an effort to try and catch
evangelicals in a pickle, Stark argues that if inerrancy is true then Jesus was
errant because He predicted that the end of the world would occur within the
lifetime of the apostles, and it didn’t.

a.Of course, Jesus could have been wrong about the
time of His coming, since immediately after He states this, He states that He
doesn’t actually know when the time of the end will occur. In fact, this should
be the first clue that there are two different things going on here, since He
states with great certainty what time frame the event He is addressing will
occur, and then continues to say that He has no knowledge of when it will
occur.

b.Stark seems to be unaware of the more likely
interpretation of this passage, which is the partial-Preterist view that Jesus
is talking about the destruction of Jerusalem in this context. Along with it,
as apocalypticism almost always does, is a description of the micro-event as
though it was the macro-event of the end. Again, it is likely this distinction that
Christ has in mind by saying that He both knows when it (i.e., the destruction
of the temple/Jerusalem) will occur and does not know when it (i.e., the end of
the world/the Second Coming) will
occur. This would take more than a paragraph to demonstrate, but Second Temple
Jewish apocalyptic texts often mesh a micro-event with the macro-events (i.e.,
either the commencement of the creation of the world or the consummation of
that creation) as though they were one single event. That John Collins, a
Second Temple scholar, endorsed and wrote the foreword to the bookis all the more surprising, but apparently
liberal apologetics wins out over genuine scholarship when evangelicals are the
target. We see this often with the nonsense over at Peter Enns’s blog (another
liberal Second Temple commentator that Stark thanks in his preface).

6.There is, of course, an epistemological naïveté
in the book. Stark seems to think that one does not need an inerrant source of
truth in order to know truth, and this is simply rubbish to anyone who has
studied the issue. If a finite being with finite knowledge does not have an
inerrant source of truth that stems from a transcendent infinite being then one
cannot know anything. He can only guess at everything in the dark without any
knowledge of whether he is moving closer or further away from the truth and the
good. What Stark is essentially arguing for, as most liberals do, is for an
intuitive inerrant source, where one patches into the divine truth from one’s
own nature. Much theology can be added to this ad hoc, such as the Holy Spirit
guides humans into truth and whatnot, but the question will always be how one
knows any of this. If liberals want to argue that they believe in their intuition
in the same way that orthodox Christians believe in the Bible, that’s fine with
me. I agree that they do. The problem is simply that this is not a version of
Christianity. It is simply one more expression of the anti-Logos, in replace of
the one who is Christ Himself revealed in words, and a completely different
religion than that of orthodox Christianity which is an externally-oriented, revealed
religion and not an internally-oriented revealed one, as all pagan religions
and non-religions are. With liberalism, Stark carries in a host of presuppositions (not merely bias--note the difference please) concerning the nature of God, man, the Bible, etc. that cannot be critically evaluated without first assuming a different set of presuppositions by which to measure them. Hence, we are left with faith, not scholarship, and this is merely one faith telling another faith that it is wrong. But, again, this was not the claim made in the book. Stark
did not set out to counter orthodox Christianity with his alternate religion,
at least that is not what he claimed to be doing. Instead, if he wanted to
reach the goal of his argument, he needed to accept the Bible that orthodox
Christians have accepted, and show that their beliefs concerning it are
internally invalid. He could not do that. Hence, we got the argument he gave,
and not the one that we needed in order to see his position as a valid one.

There is a lot more I could say
about his other minor arguments that also have to do with particular
interpretations of passages, but I think the above should suffice in showing
that this book was received well by the liberal community of scholars either
because (1) they’re so bent on undermining traditions and traditional
Christianity that they don’t mind supporting an M.A.R. student who is willing
to use any bad argument possible to undermine it, or (2) that they simply make
the same mistakes daily in their classrooms and works that they think that
Stark’s scholarship is sound. I’m going to be generous and say that it’s likely
a mixture of both. In either case, however, the substandard state of
scholarship in terms of being critical of its own methodologies is put on
display for all eyes to see if one is so inclined to see it.

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About Me

I am a perpetual student of the Bible. I hold a B.A. in Biblical Theology from Moody Bible Institute, an M.A. in Old Testament and Semitic Languages from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where I also received Candidacy for an M.A. in New Testament, as well as achieving Candidacy for the ThM in New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary. I have a wife and nine children who I love beyond measure; and am committed to Christ through what has been historically maintained as orthodox Christianity.